Westlake Village (CA) - The average hard-drive is a treasure trove of information, full of addresses, credit card numbers and other sensitive data. While many people know how to delete or format their drives, are they really doing a complete job? EraseYourHardDrive.com offers software that promises military grade erasure, for a decent price.

The software which is also called EraseYourHardDrive.com is downloaded from the web. After the download, the software kicks you off the Internet and starts deleting the contents of the drive. When it is done, a certificate of destruction is made that can be printed or saved to floppy/CD. Depending on the size of the hard-drive, the process can take from 20 minutes to one hour.

Marc Sherman, CEO of EraseYourHardDrive.com says that the software gives people peace of mind and helps out businesses covered by privacy legislation, such as medical billing companies under HIPPA. "The gist behind the business is to give the small office or doctor's office a chance to dispose of their computers within government guidelines," Sherman says.

The software formats the drive according to Department of Defense specification 5220.22-M, which formats and writes data to the drive at least three times. The first time, the drive is formatted and written with a stream of ones and zeros (1010101010). The next time, the stream is reversed. Finally the third time a random stream of Bytes is written. While this is pretty good, it's interesting to note that the DoD does NOT recommend this method for wiping out data from drives classified as TOP SECRET. For those drives, mechanical destruction or degaussing is the only approved method.

Sherman says, "your computer is a wealth of knowledge, everyone shreds their paper documents, but forget that the stuff was generated from the computer."

The software from EraseYourHardDrive.com sells for $24 and is available now.

Source : Tom's Hardware US